Mrs. Gaskell
Ever since Eve gave Adam of the forbidden fruit, "and he did eat," the relative position of the sexes has rankled in the heart of man. The sons of Adam proclaim loudly that they were given dominion over the earth and all that the earth contained; but they have been ever ready to follow blindly the beckoning finger of some fair daughter of Eve. Perhaps it is a consciousness of this domination of the weaker sex that has led man to proclaim in such loud tones his mastery over woman, having some doubts of its being recognised by her unless asserted in bold language. At a time when the novels of women received as warm a welcome from the public and as large checks from the publishers as those of men, a writer whose sex need not be given thus discussed their relative merits:
"What is woman, regarded as a literary worker? Simply an inferior animal, educated as an inferior animal. And what is man? He is a superior being, educated by a superior being. So how can they ever be equal in that particular line?"
Granted the premises, there can be but one conclusion.
The perfect assurance with which men have asserted their own sufficiency in all lines of art would be amusing if it had not been so disastrous in distorting and warping at least three of them: music, the drama, and prose fiction. As slow as the growth of spirituality, has been the recognition of woman's mental and moral power. It seems almost incredible that not many years ago only male voices were heard in places of amusement. Deep, rich, full, and sonorous, no one disputes the beauty of the male chorus; but modern opera would be impossible without the soprano and alto voices, and Madame Patti, Madame Sembrich, and Madame Lehman have proved that in natural gifts and in the technique of art women are not inferior to their brethren.
By the same slow process women have won recognition on the stage. Even in Shakespeare's time men saw no reason why women should acquire the histrionic art. Imagine Juliet played by a boy! Yet Essex, Leicester, Southampton, in the boxes, the groundlings in the pit, and Ben Jonson sitting as critic of all, were well satisfied with it, for they were used to it, just as men have accepted the heroines of their own novels, though every woman they meet is a refutation of their truth. It only needed a woman in a woman's part to open the eyes of the audience to all they had missed before. Not until the Restoration, did any woman appear on the English stage. The following lines given in the prologue written for the revival of Othello, in which the part of Desdemona was acted for the first time by a woman, show how quick critics were to see the folly of the old custom:
For to speak truth, men act, that are between
Forty and fifty, wenches of fifteen,
With bone so large, and nerve so uncompliant,
When you call Desdemona, enter Giant.
As we cannot conceive of the English stage without such women as Mrs. Siddons, Charlotte Cushman, and Ellen Terry, so we cannot conceive of the English novel without such writers as Maria Edgeworth, Jane Austen, Mary Mitford, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, and George Eliot, each one of whom carried some phase of the novel to so high a point that she has stood pre-eminent in her own particular line. Too often we confuse art with its subject-matter. If it requires as much skill to give interest to the everyday occurrences of the home as to the thrilling adventures abroad; to depict the life of women as the life of men; to reveal the joys and sorrows of a woman's heart as the exultations and griefs of man's; then these women deserve a place equal to that held by Richardson, Fielding, Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray. Their art, as their subject-matter, is different. With the exception of George Eliot, they have not virility with its strength and power, but they have femininity, no less strong and powerful, a quality possessed by Scott, but by no other of these masculine writers, with the possible exception of Dickens, and in him it is a femininity, which tends to run to sentimentalism, a different characteristic.
Elizabeth Gaskell, one of the most feminine of writers, is so well known as the author of Cranford, that delightful village whose only gentleman dies early in the story, that many of its readers do not know that its author was better known by her contemporaries through her humanitarian novels; in which she discussed the great problems that face the poor.
Mrs. Gaskell, whose maiden name was Stevenson, was born in Chelsea in 1810. She spent the greater part of her childhood and girlhood at the home of her mother's family, Knutsford in Cheshire, the place she afterward made famous under the name of Cranford. In 1832, she married the Reverend William Gaskell, minister of the Unitarian chapel in Manchester, and that city became her home. She took an active interest in all the affairs of the city, and constantly visited the poor. Her husband's father, besides being the professor of English History and Literature in Manchester New College, a Unitarian institution, was a manufacturer; thus Mrs. Gaskell had the opportunity of hearing both sides of the controversy which was then waging between labour and capital.
In the early forties, there was much suffering among the "mill-hands"; many were dying of starvation, and consequently there were many strikes and uprisings. These conditions led to her writing her first novel, Mary Barton. The book was written during the years 1845-1847, although it was not published until 1848. The nucleus of it, Mrs. Gaskell wrote to a friend, was John Barton. Since she herself was constantly wondering at the inequalities of fortune, which permitted some to starve, while others had abundance, how must it affect an ignorant man, himself on the verge of starvation, and filled with pity for the sufferings of his friends? Driven almost insane by the condition of society, and hoping to remedy it, he commits a crime, which preys so upon his conscience that it finally wears out his own life.
Mrs. Gaskell in this, her first novel, has left an undying picture of that section of smoky Manchester where the mill-workers live: its narrow lanes; small but not uncomfortable cottages, well supplied with furniture in days when work was plentiful, but destitute even of a fire when it was scarce; the undersized men and women, with irregular features, pale blue eyes, sallow complexions, but with an intelligence rendered quick and sharp by their life among the machinery, and by their hard struggle for existence. The life of the poor had often furnished a theme for the poets, but it was the life of shepherds and milkmaids, above whom the blue sky arched, and whose labours were brightened by the songs of the birds, and the colours and sweet odours of fruit and flowers. But Mrs. Gaskell described the life of the poor in a town where factory smoke obscured the light of the sun, and where the weariness of labour was rendered more intense by the clanging factory bell, and the constant whirr of machinery ringing in their ears. It is a gloomy picture, but no gloomier than the reality.
Disraeli in Sybil discussed the questions of labour and capital in their relations to the history of England, with a broad intellectual grasp of the sociological causes which produced these conditions. He wrote in the interests of two classes, the Crown and the People, with the hope that England might again have a free monarchy and a prosperous people. It is a well illustrated treatise on government, but the principles advocated or discussed always overshadow the characters. He had no such intimate knowledge of the lives of the poor as had Mrs. Gaskell. She conducts us to the homes of John Barton, George Wilson, and Job Legh, shows the simplicity of their lives, and their sense of the injustice under which they are suffering, and their helpfulness to each other in times of need.
How simple and true is the friendship that binds Mary Barton, the dressmaker's apprentice; Margaret, the blind singer; and Alice Wilson, the aged laundress, whose mind is constantly dwelling on the green fields and running brooks of her childhood's home. These women possess the strength of character of the early Teutonic women. They are reticent, not given to the exchange of confidences, but ready to help a friend with all they have in the hour of need. When Margaret thinks that the Bartons are in want of money, she says to Mary, "Remember, if you're sore pressed for money, we shall take it very unkind if you do not let us know." But she does not question her. Later when her great trouble comes to Mary Barton, which she must bear alone, when she must free a lover from the charge of murder without incriminating her father, she shows presence of mind, clearness of vision, and both moral and physical courage.
Jem Wilson, the hero of the story, is as strong as Mary Barton, the heroine. Although Dickens was writing of the poor, he always found some means to educate his heroes, and generally placed them among gentlemen. Jem Wilson's education was received in the factory, and the little rise he made above his fellows was due to his better understanding of machinery. He was a working man, proud of his skill, and of his good name for honesty and sobriety.
The plot of Mary Barton is highly melodramatic, and its technique is open to criticism. It should not be read, however, for the story, but for the many home scenes in which we come into close sympathy with the men and women of Manchester. There is no novel in which we feel more strongly the heart-beats of humanity. It leaves the impression, not of art, but of life.
Mrs. Gaskell turned again to the struggles between labour and capital for the plot of her novel North and South. Between this story and Mary Barton she had written Cranford and Ruth, but her mind seemed to revert, as it were, from the peaceful village life to the stirring mill-towns of Lancashire. The great contrast between life in the counties of England presided over by the landed gentry, and that in the counties where the manufacturers formed the aristocracy, suggested this book. It was published in 1855, seven years after Mary Barton. The plot of North and South is better proportioned than is that of Mary Barton. There are fewer characters, better contrasted. It is a brighter picture, with more humour, but it does not leave so strong an impression on the mind as does the earlier work. Both, however, are more accurate than Hard Times, a book with which Dickens himself was highly dissatisfied. He knew little of the life in the manufacturing districts, but, in a spirit of indignation at the poverty brought on by grasping manufacturers, he caricatured the entire class in the persons of Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby. When these men are compared with the manufacturers as represented in North and South, Mrs. Gaskell's more intimate knowledge of them is at once apparent.
Mrs. Gaskell had been accused of taking sides with the working men, and representing their point of view in Mary Barton. In North and South, the hero, Mr. Thornton, is a rich manufacturer, a fine type of the self-made man, but standing squarely on his right to do what he pleases in his own factory. "He looks like a person who would enjoy battling with every adverse thing he could meet with—enemies, winds, or circumstances," was Margaret Hale's comment when she first met him. "He's worth fighting wi', is John Thornton," said one of the leaders of the strike. For although the condition of affairs in the mill-towns had much improved since John Barton went to London as a delegate from his starving townsmen, and was refused a hearing by Parliament, a large part of the book is concerned with the story of a strike, which in its outcome brought starvation to many of the men, and bankruptcy to some of the masters, the acknowledged victors.
Higgins, one of the leaders of the working men, is a true Lancashire man, and like Thornton, the leader of the masters, has many traits of character as truly American as English. His sturdy independence is well shown in Margaret's first interview with him. The daughter of a vicar in the south of England, she had been accustomed to call upon the poor in her father's parish. Learning that Higgins's daughter, Bessy, is ill she expresses her desire to call upon her. "I'm none so fond of having stranger folk in my house," Higgins informs her, but he finally relents and says, "Yo may come if yo like."
But besides the conflict between the manufacturers and their employees, with which much of the book is concerned, there is the sharp contrast between the Hales, born and bred in the south of England, and the mill-owners in whose society they are placed. Mr. Hale, indecisive, inactive, in whom thought is more powerful than reality, is as helpless as a child among these men of action, and utterly unable to cope with the problems they are facing. Margaret, the refined daughter of a poor clergyman, is contrasted with the proud Mrs. Thornton, the mother of a wealthy manufacturer, who would make money, not birth, the basis of social distinctions. But Margaret is even better contrasted with the poor factory girl, Bessy Higgins, who turns to her for help and sympathy. There is hardly a story of Mrs. Gaskell's which is not adorned by the friendship of the heroine for some other woman in the book.
In both these novels, she taught that the only solution of the great problem of capital and labour was a recognition of the fact that their interests were identical, and that friendly intercourse was the only means of breaking down the barrier that divided them.
Mrs. Gaskell was so versatile, she touched upon so many problems of human life, that it is almost impossible to summarise her work. Ruth considers the question of the girl who has been betrayed. Ruth is as pure as Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and like her is a victim of circumstances. A stranger who has taken her under her protection reports that Ruth is a widow, and Ruth passively acquiesces in the deception, hoping that her son may never know the disgrace of his birth. But the truth comes to light, involving in temporary disgrace Ruth and her son, and the household of Mr. Benson, the dissenting minister whose home had been her place of refuge. But Mrs. Gaskell is always optimistic. By her good deeds, Ruth wins the love and honour of the entire community. This novel was loudly assailed. It was claimed that Mrs. Gaskell had condoned immorality, and it was considered dangerous teaching that good deeds were an atonement for such a sin. But if Ruth found detractors, it also found warm admirers, who recognised the broader teachings of the story. Mrs. Jameson wrote to Mrs. Gaskell:
"I hope I do understand your aim—you have lifted up your voice against 'that demoralising laxity of principle,' which I regard as the ulcer lying round the roots of society; and you have done it wisely and well, with a mingled courage and delicacy which excite at once my gratitude and my admiration."
The scene of Sylvia's Lovers is laid in Whitby, at a time when the press-gang was kidnapping men for the British navy. It is a story of the loves, jealousies, and sorrows of sailors, shopkeepers, and small farmers, among whom Sylvia moves as the central figure. Du Maurier, who illustrated the second edition of this novel, was so charmed with the heroine that he named his daughter Sylvia for her. This story, like Ruth, has much of the sentimentalism so fashionable in the middle of the nineteenth century. The leading canon of criticism at that time was the power with which a writer could move the emotions of the reader, and the novelist was expected either to convulse his readers with laughter or dissolve them into tears. There are many funny scenes in Sylvia's Lovers, but the key-note is pathos. Like many novels of Dickens, there are death-bed scenes introduced only for the luxury of weeping over sorrows that are not real, and there are melodramatic situations as in her other books. Parts of this novel suggested to Tennyson the poem of Enoch Arden.
But, however powerful may be the novels dealing with the questions that daily confront the poor, there is a perennial charm in the society of people who dwell amid rural scenes. Mrs. Gaskell has written several short stories of the pastoral type. Such a story is Cousin Phillis. It is a beautiful idyl and reminds one of the old pastorals in which ladies and gentlemen played at shepherds and shepherdesses. Cousin Phillis cooks, irons, reads Dante, helps the haymakers, falls in love, and mends a broken heart, and is brave, true, and unselfish. Her father is what one would expect from such a daughter. He cultivates his small farm, finds rest from his labours in reading, and neglects none of the many duties which belong to him as the dissenting minister of a small village.
Cranford and Wives and Daughters have this in common, that the scene of both is laid in the village of Knutsford. The former is a rambling story of events in two or three households, and of the social affairs in which all the village is concerned. It is without doubt the favourite of Mrs. Gaskell's novels. Wives and Daughters was Mrs. Gaskell's last story, and was left unfinished at her death. It shows a great artistic advance over her earlier work. The plot is more natural; it has not so many sharp contrasts, which George Eliot criticised in Mrs. Gaskell's stories. The characters are also more subtle. Molly, the daughter of the village doctor, is an unselfish, thoughtful girl, but with none of that unreal goodness which Dickens sometimes gave to his heroines. When she receives her first invitation to a child's party, and her father is wondering whether or not she can go, her speech is characteristic of her nature:
"Please, Papa,—I do wish to go—but I don't care about it."
Molly feels very keenly, and longs for things with all the strength of an ardent nature, but she always subordinates herself and her wishes to others. In the character of Cynthia, Mrs. Gaskell makes a plea for the heartless coquette. Cynthia is beautiful, she likes to please those in whose company she finds herself, but quickly forgets the absent. It is not her fault that young men's hearts are brittle, for it is as natural for her to smile, and be gay and forget, as it is for Molly to love, be silent, and remember. So it is Cynthia who has the lovers, while Molly is neglected. Clare, Cynthia's mother, is more selfish than her daughter, but she has learned the art of seeming to please others while thinking only of pleasing herself. She is as crafty as Becky Sharp, but softer, more feline, and more subtle; a much commoner type in real life than Thackeray's diplomatic heroine.
Mr. A. W. Ward, in the biographical introduction to the Knutsford Edition of her novels, says of her later work:
"When Mrs. Gaskell had become conscious that if true to herself, to her own ways of looking at men and things, to the sympathies and hopes with which life inspired her, she had but to put pen to paper, she found what it has been usual to call her later manner—the manner of which Cranford offered the first adequate illustration, and of which Cousin Phillis and Wives and Daughters represent the consummation."
The same critic compares the later work of Mrs. Gaskell with the later work of George Sand and finds that "in their large-heartedness" they are similar. He also gives George Sand's tribute to her English contemporary. "Mrs. Gaskell," she said, "has done what neither I nor other female writers in France can accomplish: she has written novels which excite the deepest interest in men of the world, and yet which every girl will be the better for reading."
It is not often that a novelist finds another writer to take up and enlarge her work as did Mrs. Gaskell. Her novels contain the germ of much of George Eliot's earlier writings. The Moorland Cottage suggested many parts of The Mill on the Floss. Edward and Maggie Brown—the former important, consequential and dictatorial, the latter self-forgetful, eager to help others, and by her very eagerness prone to blunders—were developed by George Eliot into the characters of Tom and Maggie Tulliver. The weak and fretful mothers in the two books are much alike, while the love story and the catastrophe have the same general outline.
They both drew largely from the working people of the North or of the Midlands, and both constantly introduced Dissenters. Silas Marner belongs to the manufacturing North, and the people of Lantern Yard are of the same class as those of Manchester and Milton. Felix Holt and Adam Bede belong to the same type as Jem Wilson and Mr. Thornton, while Esther Lyon is not unlike Margaret Hale. Both often presented life from the point of view of the poor.
Both were interested in the development of character, and in the changes which it underwent for good or evil under the influence of outward circumstances. But George Eliot had greater intellectual power than Mrs. Gaskell. She had the broader view and the deeper insight. Mrs. Gaskell could never have conceived the plots nor the characters of Romola nor Middlemarch. She constantly introduced extraneous matter to shape her plots according to her will, while with George Eliot the fate of character is as hard and unyielding as was the fate of predestination in the sermons of the old Calvinistic divines. Mrs. Gaskell, like Dickens, introduced death-bed scenes merely to play upon the emotions. George Eliot was never guilty of this defect; with her, character is a fatalism that is inexorable.
But Mrs. Gaskell had a more hopeful view of life than had George Eliot. The Unitarians believe in man and have faith in the clemency of God. This makes them a cheerful people. However dark the picture that Mrs. Gaskell paints, we have faith that conditions will soon be better, and at the close of the book we see the dawn of a brighter day. George Eliot had taken the suggestions of Mrs. Gaskell and amplified them with many details that the woman of lesser genius had omitted. But to each was given her special gift. If George Eliot's characters stand out as more distinct personalities, they are drawn with less sympathy. George Eliot's men and women are often hard and sharp in outline; Mrs. Gaskell's, no matter how poor or ignorant, are softened and refined.
It was this quality that made it possible for her to write that inimitable comedy of manners, Cranford. Her other novels with their deep pathos, strong passion, and dramatic situations must be read to show the breadth of her powers, but Cranford will always give its author a unique place in literature. Imagine the material that furnished the groundwork of this story put into the hands of any novelist from Richardson to Henry James. It seems almost like sacrilege to think what even Jane Austen might have said of these dear elderly ladies. As for Thackeray, their little devices to keep up appearances would have seemed to him instances of feminine deceit, and he might have put even Miss Jenkyns with her admiration of Dr. Johnson into his Book of Snobs. What tears Dickens would have drawn from our eyes over the love story of Miss Matty and Mr. Holbrook. How George Eliot would have mourned over the shallowness of their lives. Henry James would have squinted at them and their surroundings through his eye-glass until he had discovered every faded spot on the carpet or skilful darn in the curtain. Miss Mitford would have appreciated these ladies and loved them as did Mrs. Gaskell, only she would have been so interested in the flowers and birds and clouds that she would have forgotten all about the Cranford parties, and would probably have ignored the presence in their midst of the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson, the sister-in-law of an earl. So we must conclude that only Mrs. Gaskell could make immortal this village of femininity, where to be a man was considered almost vulgar, but into which she has introduced one of the most chivalrous gentlemen in the person of Captain Browne, and one of the most faithful of lovers in the person of Mr. Holbrook, while no book has a more lovable heroine than fluttering, indecisive Miss Matty, over whose fifty odd years the sorrows of her youth have cast their lengthening shadows.
Mary Barton is a work of genius. Only a woman of high ideals could have drawn the character of Margaret Hale, an earlier Marcella, or Molly Gibson, or Mr. Thornton, or Mr. Holman. Only a woman of deep insight could have created a woman like Ruth: a book which in its problem and its deep earnestness reminds one of Aurora Leigh. But her readers will always love Mrs. Gaskell for the sake of the gentle ladies of Cranford.